BlueMoon Solutions

Amazon Echo Dot – amazing voice recognition device

Well we have a new gadget / toy / essential piece of equipment (delete as appropriate) at BlueMoon Towers this month. Her name is Alexa and as an experiment in voice controlled, computerised assistant its pretty good, and is about the size of a black or white puck.

Amazon have created a thing called the Echo Dot. It is a small (and cheaper) version of the Echo which is a speaker that sits in your home and connects to your Internet connection and spends its life listening to its activation word. Once it hears this word it will attempt to interperet what you say afterwards and do whatever you instruct it to do.

So, imagine talking to your computer, asking it questions, telling it to play your favorite music or just telling it to remind you at certain times – yep thats what the Echo Dot is all about and its only £50!

Just say “Alexa play Frank Sinatra” – and Frank’s dulset tones start to play, “Alexa play my morning breifing” and she starts to read the news headlines from the BBC. “Alexa set an alarm for 1.30pm today” and she confirms that she will do just that.

The voice recognition really is very good, even understanding different accents easily. If you’d like to learn more about this nifty little device there is a video available at https://youtu.be/24Hz9qjTDfw

The sound from the Echo is ok (not great) but it does have an audio-out port which you can plug into your existing speakers, or you can pair it with any bluetooth speakers that you have to get better quality audio.

At the moment its only available to buy from the UK or the US, so if you wanted one then you would need to get someone to bring it over to Spain. There are a couple of little snags as it’s not designed to work outside the country its sold in, for instance, if you ask her what the weather is like she responds with UK wearther for the address that you register her to, however even this isn’t really a big deal as you can just say “Alexa whats the weather like in Alicante”. Amazon say that they will be expanding the service as time goes on to include more countries and languages.